The Gun Club, Fire Of Love
Featured Album
The invention of punk blues remains its high-water mark.
It's hard to think of a more auspicious beginning than the first song on the Gun Club's debut, the wonderfully nihilistic "Sex Beat." Ward Dotson's slide guitar chops like a dozen machetes and Jeffrey Lee Pierce sings like Elvis's demented zombie while the rhythm section — Rob Ritter and Terry Graham, formerly of first generation L.A. punk act the Bags — holds it all together. A reggae-obsessed, portly junkie who passed away from complications of hepatitis and AIDS in 1996, Pierce sounds like Teen Wolf stuck in lycanthropic transition. On the otherwise sublime "For the Love of Ivy," a revved-up paean to Lux Interior from the Cramps, Pierce adopts the persona of a redneck, howling "I was huntin 'for n***ers down in the dark." Such sentiments may seem lazily offensive today, but back in the day they were powerfully transgressive.
Like their contemporaries X, the Cramps and the Blasters, the Gun Club used roots music as a springboard to both the past and the future. We'd not have a White Stripes, King Khan (or most of the bands on the Sympathy for the Record Industry and In the Red labels) without them. Many bands in the late '70s seemed to tinker with the wheel of rock music enough that surely, for example, the Swell Maps, Pere Ubu and Raincoats must have sounded incredibly original. But not all punk acts were that "original" by any means — the music of the Clash and Sex Pistols (and the Blasters and X) was often merely a sped-up version of Chuck Berry tunes. And punk's sound was remarkably blanched. This was of course a direct response to the wanky, tepid blues-jam structures that dominated so much stadium rock back then. The Gun Club blatantly pointed to rock's black blues foundation, whether by copping ancient licks or outright covering Son House's wonderful rant against religious hypocrisy, "Preachin 'Blues." In so doing, they basically invented the concept of "punk blues," and this masterpiece remains that music's high water mark.
